Even with two shows, Nia Long manages to get her kids in bed

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Talk to Nia Long and one gets the impression that this is a very spiritual woman.

After all, the 45-year-old Brooklyn, N.Y., native and star of such movies as “Boyz n the Hood,” “Love Jones” and “Mooz-Lum” regularly does community service, takes pleasure in cooking for family and friends and chooses movie roles based on what she sees as their truth. And she took her latest job, ABC’s Tuesday sitcom “Uncle Buck,” based on the fact that it enables her to stay close to home and her two children and fiance Ime Udoka, an assistant coach with the San Antonio Spurs.

“When I think about lifestyle and balance and having time for my family, it was just attractive for so many reasons,” she says. “It shoots in L.A., it’s like 10 minutes away from my house, it’s Mike Epps, it’s Will Packer, it’s Steven Cragg, it’s Brian Bradley. Like, it’s just an amazing package to be a part of.

“And for me, I want to be able to come home and tuck my kids in bed and see them before they go to school the next morning and be there for them, and I have a teenager and a 4-year-old so it just made sense all the way around. And I honestly just decided how great is it to go to work and be able to laugh every day. So it’s so perfect that it’s terrifying.”

Long is a woman in demand these days. In addition to “Buck,” she’ll be appearing in Season 2 of Amazon’s “Hand of God” playing a journalist. And then there is a feature film she’ll start shooting this summer that she can’t talk about.

Both jobs allow her to stay close to home.

“Once you start to have children you realize there is truth in the saying that it takes a village,” she says. “And it’s easier for me as a person to give than receive. I’m naturally, I think, a giver and I have to drop into my spiritual self to also receive because it’s kind of the ebb and flow of the universe — not to get all New Age-y on you but that’s the truth.”